


the cries and the wails of the valley below

by sunsmasher



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Gen, Weechesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 01:16:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is eleven years old and didn’t tell his dad about the cough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the cries and the wails of the valley below

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, I wrote this in a night what the fuck.

Dean is eleven years old and didn’t tell his dad about the cough.

It’s not a bad cough, just a little hitch in his chest and his throat when he inhales, maybe a hack or two on the exhale, but he’s totally fine otherwise. Sure he’s feeling kind of cold, suppressing a shiver whenever Sammy’s looking his way and allowing himself a shake when his brother’s eyes are back on the TV, but there’s a snowstorm on outside and this motel is kind of shit. He doesn’t use those exact words with Sammy, of course, because Dad said they might be going back to school soon and Dean’ll be the one to sign the notes if the teachers hear Sammy hollering ‘fuck!’ out on the playground again, but the sentiment lingers. The motel is shit and smells like degreaser and there’re cigarette butts in the soap dish in the bath and he can hear the prostitute doing her thing next door in between commercials and the motel is shit.

Dean burrows deeper into his thin coat.

He doesn’t know when Dad’ll be back. John left around noon, promising to return soon, it’s only an angry spirit, Dean, I’ll be back before you know it and maybe if you keep an extra good eye on Sammy I’ll bring back some of that Chef Boyardee you really like, ok? but that’s not worth much. Dean hasn’t needed to be told to look after Sammy since he was four years old and coughing up soot, and he hasn’t liked Chef Boyardee since he was eight and barfed it up at Bobby’s place after school, but he nodded anyways and kept his back straight and his shoulders squared because that always made Dad smile at him like he really trusted Dean, and Dean didn’t tell him about the cough. He might have stayed then, because of Dean, and then more people might have gotten hurt, because of Dean, and Dean didn’t tell him about the cough.

He sniffles a little, and wipes the cool bump of his wrist against his nose.

It’s pretty late by now, the lights of the highway flimsy through the window and scattered in the heavy snow, and Sammy squawks when the D-lister on screen—C-lister if you squint—finds himself with a chainsaw in his gut. The movie, very much like the hotel, is shit, and if John Winchester were the type to know what kind of TV his kids watched he’d probably disapprove, but Dean figures if he’s extra benevolent tonight maybe Sammy won’t notice the way Dad hasn’t come home yet, or the way Dean’s getting kind of cold, even with the coat and the covers and the kid brother clinging to his side. The violins pick up, reedy and warbled out of the TV’s shabby speakers, and Sammy presses his face into Dean’s rib, crushing a band around his waist with both arms. Dean, even as he laughs, “Jeez, Sammy, you’re scared of _this_?” and Sammy hisses into the pilled fabric of his coat _shut up shut up shut up_ , is unfortunately grateful for the warmth, and he drapes an arm around Sammy’s small shoulders.

As the last Midwestern teenager bleeds out and the credits start rolling Dean peels at least three of Sammy’s limbs from his body and says, no longer a compassionate god of late night television, “Ok, let’s go, butt off the bed, go brush your teeth and put on some freaking PJ’s.”

Sammy groans, a single, stubborn six-year-old’s moan of, “Deeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaannnnnnoooooooo,” but Dean will not hear this, he is not having this, and he propels his brother off the bed with two hands in the small of his back.

“Teeth brushed or the Walkman gets it!” he shouts, as Sammy stumbles into the bathroom, still moaning like swamp monster, and Sammy yelps like he’s been bitten and Dean smirks at the sudden noises of teeth brushing in action. Dean himself takes the opportunity to roll off the bed in search of warmer clothes, teeth not even chattering a little, thanks, poking through their dad’s battered duffle to the tune of Sammy playing with the faucets, and jeez, the hell is he doing in there, tap dancing?

Dean finds the leather jacket stash beneath a little baggie of knives and has his hand around the collar to pull it free when behind him, from the bathroom, accompanied by a faint splash and a dull moan, there’s a _thump._

“Sammy?” Dean yells, already turning, jacket forgotten, and Sammy doesn’t reply, and the taps are still running, and when Dean gets his hand on the doorframe and swings ‘round into the bathroom Sammy is slumped to the floor in a puddle of water and blood is pouring from his head.

“Sammy, shit, _Sammy!”_ Dean shouts, knees cracking against the tile as he hits the floor and scrabbles for his brother, pulling the kid into his arms and pawing ineffectually at the slice over his eye with one sleeve. Sammy moans a little, eyelids flickering, eyes unfocused behind, and Dean swallows down rough chunks of panic. Dean knows about head wounds, John made him learn, he knows this, _come on_ , but the taps are still going and water is soaking into his jeans and Sammy’s face is washed half-over with blood and Dean’s having a little trouble concentrating right now.

He bundles his brother up, pressing an off-white towel to his forehead as best he can, and stumbles into the next room, not-quite dropping him onto John’s bed. Sammy groans again, a small noise, and manages “D—Dean?” to which Dean replies, “Hey, Sammy, it’s ok, Sammy, I’m here, it’s fine, just sit right here, Sammy, it’s ok, I promise, everything’s ok,” babble leaking from him like rain through a roof. He’s coughing again, sharp hacks as his breath gets shorter, his lungs constrict and Sammy shifts, blindly pressing back against the headboard, and yeah, they’re not gonna be welcome back at this motel Dean thinks as blood begins to wick into the sheets.

Of course, that’s not what he should be thinking about right now, and he leans over Sammy, keeping him upright with one hand at his shoulder, and grabs for the phone. The babble hasn’t stopped, he’s still whispering, “it’s fine, dude, it’s gonna be ok, it’s gonna be fine,” but Sammy just whines, stutters out Dean’s name one more time, and Dean punches John’s number into the handset with numb fingers.

The line’s dead.

Dean tries again, stretched full-body over Sammy now, near breaking his fingers against the buttons, but when he puts the phone to ear it’s the same as before. No dial tone, and when Dean looks out to the highway there’s nothing to see except a blizzard pounding snow into the window, and he realizes there’s not going to be a dial tone no matter how hard he slams the REDIAL button.

“ _Shit_ ”, he hisses, tears pricking at his eyes, frustration balling in his throat, and he absolutely refuses to cry. He’s not a _girl_ , he’s not a _baby_ , and he’s not going to _cry._ Not when Sammy’s head is bumping against his chest, slicking his shirt with blood, and Dean drops back to the bed at his side, two hands at his little brother’s face, trying to catch his rolling eye. Sammy’s head is small between Dean’s palms, big hazel eyes half-hidden by blood and heavy lids, and his bangs are starting to dry in blood-stiff spikes. Dean presses a thumb into his cheek, staring into Sammy’s face, whispering something under his breath that even he doesn’t understand, some nonsense blend of prayer and plea, and Sammy asks, in a voice small enough to slip right between Dean’s ribs and twist, “Dean—I’m—Dean, what’s happening? My head—my head hurts?” The last word rises to a question, fear starting to spike in Sammy’s voice, but Dean just shushes him, pressing another edge of the towel to his small forehead.

“It’s ok, Sammy, it’s all ok,” Dean says, the breadth of his smile inversely proportional to the sincerity behind it. Sammy’s eyes finally catch his, focus visibly returning, and Dean still doesn’t remember shit about head wounds but Sammy’s pupils don’t look wacked out, which he’s pretty sure is a good thing. “You just slipped a little, you know? Just knocked your head against the tub, but it’s totally fine, dude, you’re gonna be A-OK.”

Sammy nods a little, wincing at the motion, and Dean presses him back against the headboard. There’s confusion in Sammy’s face, dulled awareness and fuzzy fear, the beginnings of what might be hysteria in the way his breath is hitching, and Dean violently ignores the high whine of panic in his own head to wrap an arm around his kid brother’s back.  He rubs a hand between Sammy’s shoulders, making shushing noises into his ear, and he feels Sammy’s spine lose an inch or two of tension beneath his palm, something within himself unknotting in turn. “Hey, ok” he says, disentangling himself limb by limb from his brother, “Don’t move your head, dummy, it’s not gonna feel real good,” for which Sammy manages a giggle, blood diverting around his the corner of his mouth when he smiles, and now Dean means it when he smiles back. “Ok, we’re laughing, we’re smiling, we’re gonna be ok, yeah?” and Sammy mutters, “Yeah” replacing Dean’s hand over the towel against his head at his older brother’s prompting. Blood’s still trickling down around his eye, and he sways where he sits, like his head’s just a bit too heavy for his neck, but when Dean inches back Sammy stays upright and his eyes, however sluggishly, track Dean’s face.

“Where’re you going?” he asks, kinda slurred, tongue sounding too thick in his mouth, and Dean smiles again in the way he’s been learning to smile since the first time Dad didn’t make it back home for a night and a day. Dean smiles like it’s all gonna be okay or else the world’s going to have to answer to him, and the world should think twice about going up against Dean Winchester.

“Don’t you worry, Sammy,” Dean says, still smiling like he was born to it, “I’m just gonna run outside and grab someone to check you out, ok? I’ll be—“

The sudden coughing fit is an unwelcome interruption, and when Sammy jerks forward, hand and thoroughly red towel falling away from his forehead, Dean throws out an arm to stop him short, still coughing into his elbow. It doesn’t stop and he bows at the waist, knees bending to a right angle, and Dean’s not certain his lungs won’t be spread out on the floor when this is done. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Sammy swing a leg over the side of the bed and Dean tries to straighten but he’s having a hard time getting air down his lungs between the explosive hacking and horking. It peters out just as Sammy makes a move to stand and Dean shakes his head, still sucking down too much air to speak, and he locks his knees when he stands so that Sammy can’t see him shake. His hands still tremble, too much for him to will it away, so he balls them into fists and stuffs them in his pocket and says, “No, you stay right there, Sammy, I swear I’ll be right back.”

Sammy pauses, slow worry creasing his face, but doesn’t sit back again so Dean smiles big. He lets it crinkle at his eyes and pull at his cheeks, and this is it, he’s breaking out the big guns. Sammy’s been trusting this smile since the day his little baby self could tell Dean from a stone in the road, and the concern melts from his small face in an instant as Dean starts for his coat. Dean gets an inkling, sometimes, of the absolute faith his little brother has in him and his ability to make the world right, and some day it’s going to confuse him and scare the shit out of him in equal, unacknowledged measure, but right now it just means he can never, ever let him down. Somewhere around the age of three Sammy came to believe his brother walked on water and hung the stars in the sky and probably killed the dinosaurs, too, and Dean dreads the day he inevitably gives his brother a reason to doubt.

Dean shimmies into his winter coat, the one with two holes and a minimum of stuffing because John forgot to buy him a new one before they drove out of Georgia, and exchanges his Sketchers for boots fished from the bottom of his dad’s bag. They’re too big on his feet, snow’s going to get down the tops and freeze his ankles, but he’s running out of time to care. He can’t remember if you can sleep with a concussion, or how to check for a cracked skull, or how to get Sammy to stop bleeding all down his front. His brother’s still too slow, still too slurred in motion and word, and Dean knows head wounds bleed like dogs, he’s had a few himself, but Sam’s so _small_ and the blood’s already soaked through the thin towel. John’s not here and Dean, because this is what he does, needs to fix that.

“It’ll be ok, Sammy, I’ll be right back,” Dean says, still smiling like the sun, and this time it seems to catch, to pull Sammy back onto the bed and make him smile in return. “I’m just gonna go knock on doors and find someone with a cell phone, ok? I’ll be right back, just stay there. Don’t fall asleep ok?”

Sammy nods again, winces again because it still hurts even though he’d forgotten, and Deans slips out the front door of the motel room with a final, “You’ll be fine, I promise.”

Outside, and Dean either forgot this or willfully ignored it, there’s still a blizzard.

Dean buckles against the door, wind forcing him flat against the wood, and scrabbles for his hood. There’s no color out here, no form, just the pounding white flood of the snow and the ripping roar of the wind and Dean is so suddenly and exceptionally cold he thinks he could kneel down right here, in full view of no one but the blizzard and the night, and never get up again. It hollows out his bones and peels his skin off in layers, ices over his lungs when he sucks in a breath and when he coughs again and the cycle starts, the heavy in-out of hacking and gasping of never having enough air but trying and trying to get more, it floods his heart and his gut and makes it way through his sinuses to the dark behind his eyes and he hopes wherever his Dad is, it’s warmer than this.

There’s a flitting in his mind, an errant, hard-to-catch, worm of a thought, and it whispers _I’m not sure I can do this_ , but then there’s the image of Sammy in his arms and Sammy’s blood coloring his jeans and the length of his sleeves, and that silences all dissension because Dean already fucked up once tonight, and he’s not about to do it again.

He stumbles forward, one foot dragging before the other, making paths for himself in the building drifts, and maybe within an hour, maybe within a month, he makes it to the door just to the left of theirs. With one frozen claw of a fist he begins pounding at the door, shouting and hollering for help, beating sensation into his cold-numbed limbs. After a minute of this, cold burning his throat raw and locking his joints, there’s no reply, and Dean doesn’t know if there’s just no one there, because what kind of person rents a motel room in Bumfuck, Wyoming in the middle of December, anyways, the ski resorts are all miles off, or if whoever’s inside just doesn’t care, but there’s no answer and Sammy’s still bleeding, so Dean moves down to the next door and starts a’hollerin’ once more.

He falls into a rhythm of it, step step knock shout step step, and he’s can’t quite feel his hands anymore, or his feet in the depthless cavern’s of his dad’s old boots, and when he coughs now it’s weak and painful in his chest, more a full-body spasm than an expectoration, but he keeps going because he’s never learned to do anything else.

He doesn’t know how many door’s he’s knocked on, can’t even remember if he knocked at the last one or just sort of slumped against it instead, breathed shallowly through his mouth then continued on, but at the next one he can’t get his hand out of his pocket before he finds himself with his knees in the snow, head bumping against the plywood. He blinks once or twice, eyelashes feeling too heavy against his cheeks, and tries to stand up but there’s so much cold and so much wind and the blizzard just beats him down where he kneels. He knows he can stand up, he can, just give him a second, just let him rest for a moment…

  


This is the first time Dean meets Tessa.

Dean starts when she puts a gentle hand to his shoulder, eyes wide in a face worn white by the blizzard and the pneumonia’s he refused to acknowledge. She wears a face like his mother’s, not in terms of shape or color or the way she styles her hair but in the way she looks at him, the way her eyes pinch at the corners to see her boy, and she had to pull that straight from his oldest memories to get it right. Tessa dislikes wearing exact copies of her pickup’s loved ones, considers it far beyond the ‘tasteful’ demarcation line to adopt any habit popularized by demons, but for kids like this one, who go stumbling into snowstorms over nonfatal head wounds and a deathless need to be strong, she takes what help she can get.

“Aren’t you cold, sweetie?” she asks, the blizzard dim and faintly-heard around her, and Dean just stares and stares, mouth working soundlessly as she presses a warm thumb to the back of his neck and kneels beside him in the snow. He hasn’t noticed how she leaves no impressions in the drifts, or how her hair keeps still in the wind and her cheeks glow rosy in the freeze, how he breathes without coughing or how his body lies behind him in a stiff ball by the door. Instead he watches, hungry, and what pieces of his mother Tessa holds, he devours them, tracking the soft bow of her smile and the wisps of gray at her temples, gaze flicking to the hand she rests on his shoulder, swallowing the shape of her pinky where it brushes against his arm.

“What’s going on?” he whispers, voice hoarse, shifting back on his ankles, drawing his hands to his chest not with an intent to fight, Tessa suspects, but to keep himself from touching. He loves unreservedly, trusts implicitly, but she looks like a happiness he’d tucked away in a box marked “1979-1983” and never touched again for fear of being burnt. She smiles again, but now he must see what she is not, catch those wrinkles and laugh lines that are not his mother’s, every muscle and bone that does not fit to his memory of Mary and her arms around his small body, and his eyes go wider still in something like fear.

“I—I have to get back to Sammy,” he stutters suddenly, pushing himself to his feet, brushing snow from his thighs and now very pointedly not looking at his own mortal coil so close to freezing in the dark, in a town in Wyoming unworthy of its dot on the map. “He’s hurt, I have to get back, I can’t leave him, I can’t—I, I can’t go with you, ok? Not yet, I can’t yet. He’s hurt.”

He won’t look at her now, looks anywhere but her, but his body, eyes skittering towards his motel room and his brother, unseen, but he takes just a half step back and stops. His hands tug relentlessly at the hem of his shirt, his sleeves, a thread dangling from pocket, and Tessa’s not surprised he made her game so early. The under-12’s always seem to catch on quicker than their parents and the family friends, but she doesn’t drop the smile or the warmth from her eyes. She’s always been one for the soft touch, and death is a hard pill to swallow.

“It’s ok, Dean” she says, reaching a hand out to him, palm up, fingers open, “There’s nothing left to do. You can come out of the cold.”

Dean shies from her, stutters where he moves from one foot to the next, still shivering in a cold he can’t feel. “I can’t,” he repeats, “I can’t, Sammy’s hurt. I have to help him, I can’t leave him alone.”

“Your father’s on the way back,” she returns, still smiling, still an echo of his mother, still presenting to him a hand he watches warily, as if she’ll grab him and have her chance to bite. “The spirit delayed him for a while but he’s on his way back now and Sam will be fine. You don’t have to worry, Dean, John will take care of him.”

That wasn’t right, she knows it immediately by the way he takes another step back, head swinging right left, right left, eyes suddenly boring into hers. His feet move again, leaving no tracks in the snow, pulling him level with the shuddering mass of his body, and he says, “No, no, he can’t do that, I have to go back. I—I love Dad, I do, but he can’t do that, it won’t work, he’ll screw it up.”

“Dean,” she says, catching hold of the fabric at his elbow, “Dean, sweetie, it’s ok. It will all turn out all right even if you’re gone. You can sleep now, you can rest now, it will all be ok.”

But Dean doesn’t hear her, hardly even sees her at this point, just looks back to the motel room and his little brother bleeding from the head, and his dad who’s still not here and who still thinks he likes Chef Boyardee and still tells him to look after his brother like he knows to do anything else, and Tessa reaches for him, reaches to pull him into her arms and whisper him to sleep, but there’s a sudden— _twinge_ and fate changes.

Tessa shrieks, reels back against the force of it, shape flickering where she can’t control it, hair rippling through black and brown and violently red as she fights for focus and the voice, her boss, _the_ boss sounds in her ears.

There has been an intercession, it says. He will live, it says.

It _grates_ at Tessa, the wrongess scraping at her nerves and shredding through her mind, and she never knows pain except when there are intercessions, when her world and self are broken and remade to suit the whims of power far more inscrutable and full of shit than her. Dean’s spirit watches in horror, mouth open and struggling for words as Tessa screams and recedes, staggering back into the dark of the blizzard and the welcoming abyss of her own plane, shape still flickering through every memory in Dean’s head, catching attributes and postures of the thousand people he’s already loved in his short life in a manic attempt to anchor herself when she’d rather be anywhere but here.

She expects it must be horrible for him, how she shifts, and she is old and ageless but still kind in her way and hates to scare a child, but when she looks to him all she can see is his fate, thick ropes of it now spinning out his fingers and spiraling from his mouth, twining pale halos behind his head where before he’d been nothing but human. He’s surrounded by it, entirely obscured by it, lost to the knots and coils of a life he is suddenly beholden to live, and as John Winchester finds his oldest boy in the snow, too early by Tessa’s reckoning, no longer functioning within the schedule of Death and his company, she sees the little spirit, so overshadowed by another power’s predestination, blink once, twice, and vanish into his body.

You will meet him again, says the voice of Death in her ears, and Tessa collapses out of the physical world.

  


Dean’s awake in the Impala’s back seat. He hardly knows it, drifting through looping fever dreams of his mother and his brother and the both of them covered in blood, and he can't seem to remember how to open his eyes. His dad’s around, he can tell by the shouting and the smell of buckshot, but he’s so tired, and it’s been years since he slept, maybe whatever’s his dad’s yelling about, maybe that can wait a while, maybe Dean can get to it when he wakes up. He’ll do it, he mumbles into the smooth leather of the seats, he’ll do it, he swears, just let him close his eyes a moment.

There’s one thing, though, and it’s not just a little worm of a thought in the back of his brain, something that can wait, like his dad or the shouting. It’s the only thought that’s ever mattered, it’s the song he wakes up to every morning and the tune he hums every night as he sleeps, it’s his brother bleeding from the head on a motel bathroom floor, and Dean asks the back seat of the Impala, voice little more than a creak of the leather, “Is Sammy ok?”

The Impala must be listening because then Sammy’s leaning down to stare into his face, and his head’s still bleeding but it’s sluggish and quickly darkening, and that’s not perfect, Dean couldn’t fix that, but it’s ok. He can fall asleep to ok. He can do that.


End file.
